Soon, patients in Japanese hospitals may be monitored 24/7 using smartphones.

That is according to a new proposal recently announced by Japanese IT giant NEC. The new system, called as the Application Platform for Healthcare, will primarily focus on the concept of using smartphones to monitor hospital patients via wireless video feed. The system will be offered and catered to medical institutions nationwide towards the end of October.

Traditionally, nurse call systems are often made of pre-installed communications equipment that is simply set up throughout the medical establishment. If medical attention is required, users are to speak through the comms units, and a nurse on standby will arrive to assess the situation. The Application Platform for Healthcare, in terms of active monitoring, is fundamentally the same, but is significantly different in that the assessment can be done before the nurse even takes a step towards the room.

If for example, a patient calls for attention, the system can easily show a live video feed of the patient wirelessly through the smartphone. Aside from visual data, the system can also coordinate and synchronize with other existing monitoring equipment to provide the on-call nurse with the appropriate data, which may be critically necessary to quickly determine the best course of action for the patient.

NEC stresses that the system can be a very important tool during medical emergencies, where each second counts in saving a patient’s life. Instead of knowing what to do after visiting the room, the nurse can assess the situation beforehand to prevent any unnecessary complications. On certain situations, the system can even provide ample allowance to prepare the necessary equipment as the nurse or medical professional heads towards the patient’s room. When necessary, the system can also be integrated in a standard nurse call system, with nurse calls directly sending alert notifications to any system-connected smartphone.

The Application Platform for Healthcare will be available in single OS/database/software packages. Base price starts from an equivalent price of $82,000, with the complete system to be offered around $140,000 per establishment.

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The German government has announced that they will be switching away from Verizon for internet services as an ISP for the German government. They noted that the reasons for this decision had to do with increased demands on the network and the prevalence of the NSA in Verizon’s business. Based on the translation that was available, it appears as though the German government is merely using this as an opportunity to switch internet services to a company that is German. Sure, the likelihood that their networks will get snooped on by the NSA will probably go down, or at least become more difficult.

However, usually, such moves are usually just being used by the companies not involved to gain an upper hand on their competition, which is in this case Verizon. While the German government hasn’t quite made it clear who they intend to replace Verizon with, it is quite clear that the NSA’s snooping and relationship with Verizon has made doing business in Germany difficult for Verizon. This will likely not be the end of such moves by European governments and I suspect there will be more companies that will lobby their governments to switch to local ISPs or technology companies in order to ‘better protect’ themselves. While simultaneously taking an opportunity of bad PR on the part of American companies to snatch away their business.

According to an AP report, Verizon was unable to keep the contract (which they’ve held since 2010) due to the fact that they weren’t able to meet some core requirements of the German government put on the company, likely as a result of the NSA’s snooping revealed by Edward Snowden and publications like Der Spiegel. As a result of not meeting the German government’s demands on these requirements, Verizon is losing the contract in 2015 to another company, likely one based in Europe or even Germany.

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Last week ARM invited a group of journalists and analysts to Austin Texas to hear about their server, mobile, and wearable developments. ARM and their partners presented in-depth explanations of their version of the ARM architecture.

On the first day of the conference, HP’s Dwight Barron gave an overview of their Moonshot system.  They have been refining the specifications since its late 2009 inauguration.

Moonshot’s design differs from the traditional servers which have been the general-purpose workhorses of the data center. These boxes have proved to be jacks-of-all-trades, able to run operations for organizations of every shape and size. They started with proprietary operating systems and a warehouse sized room with less computing power than today’s smartphones. In the past, one could choose from several operating systems and server architectures. Today, operating system options are limited and most run on the Intel x86 architecture.

Barron explained that the cloud and mobile applications have changed the assumptions of traditional IT departments. Now IT has to balance rack space density, power consumption, thermal efficiency, and costs. Power is one of the major controlling factors in the data center.

The cloud uses more power than Japan.

The microserver SoC (System on a Chip) typically has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 15 to 20 Watts or below, compared to 90 plus Watts for a high-end server. The microserver chassis has the circuitry related to networking, storage, and cluster communications along with integrated cooling and power supply. Thus, the shared resources reduce the complexity of the overall design.

Barron showed a typical dual processor, HPC server motherboard versus the SoC based Server motherboard. The dual processor general purpose motherboard requires system RAM for the processors, dual GPU’s with their RAM as well as the overhead of a PCIe switch, storage controller, and NICs. Each of those separate chipsets consumes power and creates heat. The SoC server motherboard starts with an integrated die having all those features in silicon, which greatly reduces required power and significantly decreases heat. The SoC cartridge and the Moonshot integration will reduce the latency of the wires between the traditional HPC server’s sub-systems.

New era app focused silicon

To prove that Moonshot is a viable approach, HP put in a production configuration. At the HP.COM website there are approximately 100 applications for browsing and downloads. HP.COM’s website gets approximately 300 million hits per day. It was running on 46 HP legacy servers consuming just over 115,000 Watts per day. Replacing that legacy configuration with six Moonshot systems lowered the power consumption to 6,000 Watts and reduced the rack space usage by 89 percent.

HP 300m hits 94% less power

Barron gave a lengthy explanation of why mobile users and cloud services require application focused silicon for the servers. HP will offer server cartridges from multiple vendors – AMD, Applied Micro, Intel, and Texas Instruments. Applied Micro and Texas Instruments are based on the ARM architecture. This provides customers with the option of picking a server cartridge tailored for specific services, like High Performance Computing (HPC), gaming, telecommunications, finance, seismic imaging, Big Data analysis, web serving, and video analysis, to name a few.

TI  has developed hybrid ARM processors that mix anywhere from one to four Cortex-A15 (32-bit) cores with one to eight TMS320C66x digital signal processors into a single SoC. These combinations in the Moonshot can be used in application specific work such as pure cloud infrastructure workloads – servers, switches, routers, network control planes, and telecommunication switches with applications such as VoIP and LTE.

Applied Micro’s X-Gene 1 eight core SoC with ECC (error-correcting code) memory. The platform is capable of running a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) software stack. The X-Gene implements the ARMv8 ISA which is a full 64-bit architecture that is backwards compatible with 32-bit ARMv7. The CPU features hardware virtualization acceleration, MMU virtualization, and advanced SIMD instructions.

Barron said that ARM architecture and HP’s Moonshot will bring new performance levels and reduced power consumption to the data centers.

There was an interesting announcement in last Friday’s Digitimes. “Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) will establish a joint venture specifically for producing servers for cloud computing and offering related supporting services, according to Foxconn.”
“The partnership reflects innovation in HP’s server business model through combining Foxconn’s R&D capability and manufacturing expertise, with HP’s market leadership in cloud computing products and related services to enable both companies to offer cloud computing solutions which will change existing market game-playing rules, HP CEO Meg Whitman said.”

Paul Teich, CTO and Senior Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “HP and Foxconn’s partnership should help both of them address substantial challenges in continuing cloud computing R&D investment in spite of purchasing pressures that might lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ for prices and margins.”

BSN is planning a hands-on evaluation of the performance of an HP Moonshot with the Applied Micro X-gene cartridge. We will let you know the results as we did with our May 2011 comparison of ARM to x86.

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